Tanya Kaefer

Assistant Professor, Faculty of Education Lakehead University

  • Thunder Bay ON

Researcher in educational psychology with expertise in learning, knowledge, reading, and cognitive development.

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Biography

Tanya Kaefer is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Education at Lakehead University in the field of Educational Psychology. She studies the development of children’s knowledge and the cognitive processes involved in early learning. Specifically, she examines the sources of children’s knowledge - experiences, people, books and media - and how this knowledge may influence future learning and development. She teaches courses in Educational Psychology and Inclusive Education

Areas of Expertise

Reading Development
Cognitive Development
Early Learning
Learning & Development
Media and Learning

Education

Duke University

PhD

Psychology

2009

Duke University

MA

Psychology

2007

University of Waterloo

BA

Psychology

2004

Languages

  • English

Media Appearances

‘Educational’ products don’t make babies smarter: Canadian study

Global News  print

2014-03-10

Global News reports on the findings from one of my studies, which found that educational products targeted towards helping babies to read weren't successful.

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T&G Radio appearance

630 CHED  radio

2014-03-11

An interview in which I discuss the results of one of my studies, which found that products targeted towards helping babies to read weren't successful. My segment starts at 21 minutes into the provided link

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Can Knowledge Level The Learning Field For Children?

Albert Shanker Institute  online

2013-11-20

The Shanker Blog discusses the results of one of my studies which found that differences in background knowledge may explain some socio-economic differences in children's word-learning and reading comprehension.

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Event Appearances

Seeing and knowing: Attention to illustrations during storybook reading and narrative comprehension in 2-year-olds

Cognitive Development Society Annual Meeting  Columbus, OH

2015-10-10

The role of background knowledge in children’s word learning in shared book reading: An eye movement study.

Society for Research in Child Development Biennial Meeting  Philadelphia, PA

2015-03-19

How educational is educational television? Transferrable content and linguistic markers in children’s educational television

American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting  Philadelphia, PA

2014-04-05

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Articles

Preexisting background knowledge influences socioeconomic differences in preschoolers’ word learning and comprehension.

Reading Psychology

2015-02-01

(With SB Neuman & AM Pinkham) The goal of the current study was to explore the influence of knowledge on socioeconomic discrepancies in word learning and comprehension. After establishing socioeconomic differences in background knowledge (Study 1), the authors presented children with a storybook that incorporates this knowledge (Study 2). Results indicated that middle-income children learned significantly more words and comprehended the story better than lower-income children. By contrast, Study 3 presented children with a novel category and found that children performed equally in their word learning and comprehension. This suggests that socioeconomic differences in vocabulary and comprehension skills may be partially explained by differences in extant knowledge.

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Seeing and Knowing: Attention to Illustrations during Storybook Reading and Narrative Comprehension in 2-year-olds

Infant and Child Development

2016-12-19

Research (Evans & Saint-Aubin, 2005) suggests systematic patterns in how young children visually attend to storybooks. However, these studies have not addressed whether visual attention is predictive of children’s storybook comprehension. In the current study, we used eye-tracking methodology to examine two-year-olds’ visual attention while being read an unfamiliar storybook. Immediately following reading, they completed a comprehension assessment. Children who visually attended to illustrations depicting key narrative events during the initial reading demonstrated stronger comprehension than children who focused on other areas. Importantly, visual attention to pertinent illustrations was also positively related to parental reports of vocabulary knowledge. Collectively, this supports a reciprocal model of early knowledge development: vocabulary knowledge facilitates visual attention, and visual attention to storybook illustrations facilitates subsequent learning.

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Can babies learn to read? A randomized trial of baby media

Journal of Educational Psychology

2014-08-01

(With, SB Neuman, AM Pinkham, and GA Stause) Targeted to children as young as 3 months old, there is a growing number of baby media products that claim to teach babies to read. This randomized controlled trial was designed to examine this claim by investigating the effects of a best-selling baby media product on reading development. One hundred and seventeen infants, ages 9 to 18 months, were randomly assigned to treatment and control groups. Children in the treatment condition received the baby media product, which included DVDs, word and picture flashcards, and word books to be used daily over a 7-month period; children in the control condition, business as usual. Examining a 4-phase developmental model of reading, we examined both precursor skills (such as letter name, letter sound knowledge, print awareness, and decoding) and conventional reading (vocabulary and comprehension) using a series of eye-tracking tasks and standardized measures. Results indicated that babies did not learn to read using baby media, despite some parents displaying great confidence in the program’s effectiveness.

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